Six weeks of intensive work. Uncounted hours of typing, stripping and placing code in XHTML and CSS. People who frequently visited core have noticed the difference. Not everything was worked out when I decided to bring core live a couple of days ago. I knew it would need lots of more work. But at the same time I couldn’t look at the old core any longer. And I needed to have a live version up to figure out the quirks, improving its usability. Last but not least, I also needed some feedback. So thank you to all who sent me a note.

Although I am planning on writing an extensive report about the redesign, lining up how everything works — even without explanations the site pretty much speaks for itself. It has a much fresher look, very upfront, straight forward, avoiding unnecessary clutter. It is formal and functional, and yet it is using bright and friendly colors, which are also helping to navigate through the site. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Links use the same color and behavior throughout the entire site now. Another indicator with navigational functionality is an arrow, which sometimes changes its direction, depending on where the link will lead you. White boxes serve smaller and bigger amounts of content in consumable chunks. Those div-containers really have an IA-functionality here. Aside of dense, the core culture blog, there is only one font used throughout the whole website.

But the best part is, the site has become managable for me. It makes it easy to update content, to reflect changes not only on the blog page, but also in other sections like Practice and on the main landing page. In short, this site finally behaves and works like I do: logical, straight forward and comprehensive. To me, this is the biggest revolution since I started working in the Internet business.